*Coder Blog

Logtar tagged me with this meme over a week ago, and with everything going on last week, I’m just now catching up with it.

Four jobs I’ve had.

1. Student System Administrator for the ECE Department at UCSB.
2. Software Engineer Intern at Pacific Advanced Technology doing embedded development for an infrared video camera.
3. Software Engineer and System Administrator at Ephibian.
4. Everything from lead developer to janitor at Gaucho Software

Four movies I could watch over and over.

1. Back to the Future
2. Lord of the Rings
3. The Matrix
4. Any Pixar movie

Four places I’ve lived.

1. Santa Maria, California
2. Santa Barbara, California
3. Tucson, Arizona
4. Mt. Pleasant, Michigan

Four TV shows I love to watch.

1. Top Gear
2. Monster Garage
3. The Apprentice
4. Friends

Four favorite books.

1. Harry Potter series
2. The Soul Of A New Machine
3. A Separate Peace
4. The C Programming Language (it’s a love-hate thing…)

Four places I have been on vacation.

1. Maui and Oahu, Hawaii
2. Cruise to Cozumel, Grand Cayman, and Jamaica
3. Telluride, Colorado (Ski Trip)
4. Disney World, Florida

Four websites you visit daily (These are all RSS feeds).

1. Ars Technica
2. Slashdot
3. NWS Website
4. Autoblog

Four favorite foods

1. Mexican food (especially Enchiladas and Burritos)
2. Chinese food
3. Italian food
4. American Breakfast food (French Toast, Waffles, etc)

Four places I’d rather be right now.

1. Spending time with Katrina
2. On any beach drinking a Margarita
3. Zoom-zooming in my Mazda
4. Mountain Biking in Santa Barbara

I’m tagging anyone who wants to answer these questions… Post a link in the comments.

Hope everyone had a happy New Year. I’m just now getting caught up again after taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays. We went out to California to visit Katrina’s family for Christmas. After that we flew to Minnesota for a wedding on New Year’s Eve (my cousin got married). Overall it was a very enjoyable holiday season.

Family and friends gave me some great gifts this year, so that was pretty cool. Katrina bought me a Powershot G6 digital camera, which I have been wanting for a long time. I’ve already taken a few hundred pictures with it, and I’m pretty happy about the results so far. I’ll be heading down to the Detroit Auto Show next week, so I hope to get some good shots then. Though I haven’t posted any new pictures yet, I have a feeling my Flickr account will be more active now…

Some very cool events are coming up in the next several weeks that I’ll be attending. The first event is the Ohio LinuxFest two weeks from now. Registration is completely free thanks to their sponsors, so all I have to pay for is the hotel. It’s a one-day conference covering topics from server virtualization to running an open source company. Should be good to get back out to a Linux-focused conference…the last one I attended was OSCon back in 2002.

The other upcoming event I’m looking forward to is DrunkenBlog’s Evening at Adler. There are some well known Mac developers who are traveling from all over to be on the panel, and it sounds like quite a few others are going to attend as well. I haven’t finalized plans to attend this one yet, but I’ll be trying to find a hotel soon.

This brings up one cool thing about living in the midwest: things are so close. I can hop across to a few different states without driving too far. Back in California/Arizona, you have to drive such a distance just to get to the next metro area and it’s a pretty big deal to go to the “next state.”

I never thought I would say this, but one thing I miss about Tucson is driving. Not driving in the city…no driving in town is absolutely horrible. Driving on mountain roads is what I’m referring to. In Tucson, there were a couple of good twisty roads, like going out past Gates Pass, or Catalina Highway up to Mount Lemmon. Catalina Highway was especially fun to drive as long as you drove it at an off time when you wouldn’t get stuck behind other cars. It’s about a 45 minute drive of pure twisties, as you ascend from the Tucson valley at 2500 feet all the way up to the top of Mt. Lemmon at 9800 feet. Needless to say, you waste a ton of gas flying up that hill, because it is quite steep. But it’s a heck of a good time and you have some beautiful views along the way. Not to mention that it’s a great place to escape the heat of Tucson summers…when it’s 105 degrees in the valley, it will only be in the upper 70s up on Mt. Lemmon.

Until today, I thought that twisty roads were non-existent in Mt. Pleasant. Country roads are almost always straight, except when moving from one township to another. Townships were new to me…but the basic gist is that Michigan is broken up into 6×6 mile blocks of land called townships. This was how they sold the land back in the 1800s before Michigan became a state, and I want to say that it cost less than $1000 to buy your own township at the time. Nowadays, when a road borders two townships, there will usually be a quick S turn in the road, so the two townships split the road maintenance cost. It’s pretty amusing sometimes when you cross from one township into another and the road switches from a horrible gravelly mess to a nice blacktop. Anyway, I digress. Earlier today, I found a pretty decent twisty road. It’s a little bit outside of town, but it’s fun to drive and there isn’t a whole lot of traffic. The street is called Pine River Road, and it’s southeast of town about halfway between Mt. Pleasant and Midland. It takes about 15-20 minutes to drive from one end to another, and along the way you have some good sweeper turns and a few nice sharp corners.

I doubt I’ll get much of a chance to drive there, but it’s definitely cool to have a nice road to take when I’m just itching for some zoom-zoom.

I apologize to everyone who was trying to get to my site and couldn’t these past few days. The network connection here went down Tuesday evening, and it’s maybe worked 5% of the time since then. It looks like the connection came back online early this morning, and this time for good. We’ll see if it lasts. Luckily I was able to transfer Gaucho Software’s website over to a hosting provider fairly early on in a short interval when the connection was working, so there was minimal downtime there. I have backup mail and DNS servers outside my network here as well, so those services weren’t an issue.

I’m really frustrated at this point because it took so long to fix, and it seems like it was a routing configuration issue. If hardware breaks and needs time to be replaced, that’s one thing, but to take several days to track down a routing issue seems unacceptable to me. I’m glancing around for other ISPs in town, but it’s difficult because DSL isn’t available where we live, and it’s pretty expensive for a business class cable modem line. The company I’m with right now offers a wireless link that’s 768kbits up/down and is only $5/month for a static IP.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. Just wanted to let people know I didn’t fall off the face of the earth.

Logtar tagged me with this post, so I thought I would chime in…

10 years ago: Hmm, it was the summer between Junior and Senior years of high school. I had just gotten hooked on bodyboarding, and hit the local spots along the Central Coast of California (Pismo, Jalama, Refugio, SB, and Rincon) with Marc (and Mike and Jamie who both surfed). That became my passion and entertainment for the next several years. Lots of good times on surf trips down to Huntington Beach, San Diego and even Baja Mexico once.

5 years ago: Graduated from UCSB that December with a degree in CS. Spent the summer in Tucson, AZ with Katrina and proposed. We got married about 2 years after that…

1 year ago: Transition…I had just moved to Michigan after being in Tucson for 4 years. Besides the obvious environmental transition, my job was also transitioning from working for Ephibian to starting Gaucho Software and working for myself.

Yesterday: I’ll approach this one from both a work perspective and a personal perspective. Work was somewhat eventful. The router here started going flakey, so I went out and bought another one. Spent much of the afternoon setting that up and getting things configured. Did some maintenance stuff on the servers while I had the chance. Also, a guy from Google got in touch with me out of the blue to see if I would apply for a job there. It was a pleasant surprise, even though I’m happy with the way Gaucho Software is going. At home, I have done nothing but eat, sleep, and read book 6 of Harry Potter with Katrina. We’re almost done…

Today: Spent some time fixing Dash Monitors bugs and plan to have another release ready for early next week. Still working on a lot of updates for an upcoming Seasonality 1.1 release. It’s going to be a significant update, and even though I’ve already added thousands of lines of code, I still have a lot of work to do. From the personal perspective, Katrina and I will be finishing Harry Potter tonight.

Tomorrow: Heading on down to Lansing for “big city stuff” that we miss here in Mt. Pleasant, and will be taking the chance to go out for some Ethiopian food.

5 snacks I enjoy: Mall pretzels, gummy bears/worms/whatever, Jello, chips and salsa, and cashews.

5 bands that I know the lyrics of most of their songs: I think the only group I know most of the lyrics from are The Eagles. I listen to a variety of other stuff from rock (hard and classic), alternative, classical, country, and some hip hop, metal, and jazz. Other bands in the top 5 include Korn, Tool, Incubus, and Eric Clapton. Honorable mentions go to Tom Petty, Linkin’ Park, Guns N Roses, and the Dixie Chicks. I know…weird combination.

5 things I would do with $100,000,000: Hmm…the typical mansion and sports cars of course. I always thought it would be cool to have a private island…that would probably eat a good amount of that cash. Another thing I’ve wished I had the money for would be to open a large apartment complex for homeless people. Just charge maybe $1 for monthly rent (all utilities included) while they can get back on their feet. With $100 mil, I could probably open quite a few of these. Finally, I’d set aside a chunk of the money in investments to maintain the decisions made of what to do with the rest of the money.

5 locations I’d like to runaway to: Maui, Cayman Islands, somewhere along the Mediterranean in Italy/Spain/France, Santa Barbara, the private island mentioned above…
5 bad habits I have: Wow, this one is difficult… Maybe Katrina should answer this one for me…
5 things I like doing: Spending time with Katrina, writing code, mountain biking, bodyboarding, listening to music.

5 things I would never wear: Logtar’s got my #1 here, speedos. Others include knee socks, short shorts, tank tops, and any kind of spandex or such.

5 TV shows I like: Monster Garage, Top Gear, Apprentice, Reba, Friends.

5 movies I like: Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Gladiator, Indiana Jones, Memento.

5 famous people I’d like to meet: Hmm…I’m not much into famous people so I don’t really care to meet anyone in particular. Though Logtar’s suggestion of J.K. Rowling would be an interesting person to meet, or Harry Potter himself for that matter. I’d probably want to meet Steve Wozniak too.

5 biggest joys at the moment: Biking with Katrina, zoom-zooming in my Mazda 6, flying a kite, Gaucho Software, and summer…

5 favorite toys: My G5, iPod, the M&Ks in our home theater, my kite, and the John Deere.

5 people to tag: I don’t think I’m going to tag anyone, but definitely go for it if you care to respond.

Whoop! My good friend Alan just announced he proposed to his girlfriend, err fiancee, Christina.

I’ve known Alan for most of my life, ever since junior high actually. We both went to UCSB to study Computer Science (go Gauchos!). Of course his soon-to-be better half, Christina, is a very nice woman. I’m happy for both of them.

Best of luck!

Gumby and Pokey have grown so much since we got them last year that they were kind of uncomfortable in their old 20 gallon tank. A few weeks ago we ordered them a new tank, and the final pieces arrived this past Wednesday. The new one is a 90 gallon tank, so that should give them plenty of space. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the bigger tank won’t be too much more maintenance.

Check out the other photos here.

For some reason, I’ve found 0 time to blog recently, so it’s time to play catch-up.

Gus moved to the West Coast and is settling into his new place. Congrats to Gus and Kirstin on the move.

Brent has been posting his thoughts on Apple’s interface design in Tiger. I’m sure you’ve probably seen links to this on other blogs, but I thought I would post it anyway since all of the articles have been quite enjoyable to read.

WWDC is coming up! I’m flying out to the Bay Area tomorrow evening. Early, I know, but the airlines really aren’t convenient when you want to redeem frequent flyer miles. I’m spending the extra couple of days visiting with Katrina’s parents, so it should be a good time. This year I’m going to bring the digital camera to take some shots at the conference. Apple won’t allow photos to be taken in the sessions, so last year I figured a camera wouldn’t be of much use and I left it at home. I ended up missing out on some good photo opportunities though, so this year I’m bringing it along.

The conditions here in Mt. Pleasant last night at 1am:

Freezing Fog and 14 degrees F at Mount Pleasant Municipal Airport, MI

We had a pretty good frost last night, and everything was covered with the stuff this morning. Here’s a shot of the tree in our front yard.

Speaking of ice…file this picture of a gutter on our house under W for weird.

Looks like something I saw at Kartchner Caverns back in Arizona.